It All Starts with Digiphrenia

Image courtesy of Scanners (1981) movie poster.

The tension that is created when the analog world collides with the digital is called digiphrenia, and it is this concept that serves as the inspiration for fractal idenities. As explained in Douglas Rushkoff's book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now:

The tension between the faux present of digital bombardment and the true now of a coherently living human generates [a kind of] present shock, what we're calling digiphrenia -- digi for "digital," and phrenia for "disordered condition of mental activity."

from Ch. 2, "Digiphrenia: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do," (p. 75)

The concept of fractal identities is likewise predicated on the idea of what happens when the analog meshes with the digital, but in this case we will be exploring self and identity with relation to these phenomena and not necessarily restricting ourselves to the limiting, mostly negative connatations contained in digiphrenia.